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Erin Andrews Speaks About Cancer Diagnosis

Days after being diagnosed with cervical cancer and just moments before surgery, Erin Andrews had one request for her oncologist.

“I’m not watching any football games at home. This is [Fox’s] Super Bowl year, and I’m not missing the Super Bowl,” Andrews recalled saying.

The FOX broadcaster, who has become a sideline staple on NFL Sundays, revealed to MMQB.com she was diagnosed in late September following a routine checkup last June. While in a meeting with colleagues ahead of the Giants’ Week 3 showdown with the Redskins at MetLife, Andrews received a phone call from her doctor confirming it was cancer.

“When you hear the word cancer, you fear the worst,” said Andrews’ father, Steve. “When it’s your child, you think to yourself, you think, ‘God: Take me, not her.’ She has been through enough. She is just getting her life back.”

That’s a reference to Andrews’ other terrifying ordeal: a stalker who followed her to hotel rooms and recorded nude footage of her, later leaked online, through the peephole. Michael David Barrett went to jail, and Andrews eventually settled with the hotel operator after being awarded $55 million in a civil lawsuit in March.

Now this. But Andrews was back in the grind 48 hours after her surgery.

“Should I have been standing for a full game five days after surgery? Let’s just say the doctor didn’t recommend that,” Andrews told the website. “But just as I felt during my trial, sports were my escape. I needed to be with my crew.”

Andrews eventually came clean to her co-workers about what she was going through.

“After the trial, everyone kept telling me, ‘You’re so strong, for going through all of this, for holding down a job in football, for being the only woman on the crew,’” Andrews said. “Finally I got to the point where I believed it too. ‘Hey, I have cancer, but dammit, I am strong, and I can do this.’”

Andrews faced another procedure on Nov. 1, less than a month after her first. Nearly two weeks later, she received the phone call she had been waiting for: She was in the clear.

“Such an incredible weight had been lifted off her shoulders,” Andrews’ father recounted. “I try not to think about what happened to her too much. But when I do, and I consider the enormity of what Erin has endured, I’ll often just sit down and cry.”

Andrews will cover the Super Bowl on Feb. 5, and she got her happy ending with longtime boyfriend Jarret Stoll, a former NHL player, in the form of a holiday engagement.

“We went there for Christmas to see the Christmas decorations, and we had a lovely dinner and he did it right there at dinner at Disneyland,” Andrews gushed on “Good Morning America.” “I was bawling like a child.”